Contactless biometrics see growing adoption rate

An executive at Morpho (Safran) believes that the growing need to deliver identity verification and access control in areas of high activity, along with an increasing emphasis on health and hygiene, will drive the adoption of contactless biometrics solutions.

According to a report in ITWeb, Guillaume Lefevre, VP of sales and market development for Morpho’s access control and OEM division, says that contactless biometric solutions such as 3D facial recognition scanners, iris recognition scanners and the new MorphoWave contactless fingerprint scanner are on the verge of monopolizing new biometrics implementations.

Lefevre says the growing adoption of contactless biometric solutions can be attributed to more and more organizations wanting to ensure accurate user identification without affecting traffic or operations.

“This is one trend we expect to develop as organizations globally start refreshing their security systems,” Lefevre says. “We believe contactless is the future of biometrics, so this is a major focus for us as we renew our product ranges.

“In this strong drive to contactless technology, the MorphoWave 3D contactless fingerprint scanner is proving quite revolutionary, with use cases in areas such as the manufacturing sector, where huge shifts of workers must be identified and processed in a short period of time; as well as at airports, where hygiene and pandemic control are a major consideration; and even in enterprises where the technology ‘wow factor’ is important – such as banks and corporate headquarters.”

3D facial recognition is one particular biometrics modality that is expected to see strong growth across industrial, healthcare and consumer applications. However, Lefevre points out that it is not without its challenges.

“Facial recognition, however, is vulnerable to spoofing through the use of a photograph, so it is important that the technology delivers accurate 3D scanning that cannot be spoofed,” Lefevre says. “This technology is gaining traction in South Africa, where we are about to embark on a sizable implementation.”

Lefevre says that iris recognition technology, which has been integrated into more niche identification and access control solutions in the past few years, will not “grow globally quite as fast as other technologies, such as facial recognition.”

Morpho forecasts that there will be a global shift to the convergence of information and physical security, Lefevre says, adding that there is rising interest in combining the protection of IP and physical assets in a secured, unified digital environment with a biometric-enabled security layer.

However, Lefevre admits that achieving this goal will likely take a while to complete, especially in large organizations.

Meanwhile, some users have their share of concerns regarding the security of biometric data stored in the cloud, Lefevre says.

“There is clearly still sensitivity around the storage of data as personal as biometric information in the cloud,” Lefevre says. “This is driving our research and development around supporting mobility and BYOD, integrating hardware with applications in the cloud, while still assuring complete privacy and security around biometric data. At this stage, we believe biometric data and encryption function should not leave the device.”

Just last month, Morpho and Visa co-demonstrated a biometrics based payment concept using MorphoWave touchless technology at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at Visa’s innovation center at its San Francisco headquarters.